Always be available to your kids. Because if you say, 'Give me five minutes, give me ten minutes,' it'll be 15, it'll be 20. And then when you get there, the shine will have worn off whatever it is they wanted to share with you.
— Michael J. Fox
No matter how much money you have, you can lose it.
When I was younger, I was always described as happy-go-lucky.
Pity is just another form of abuse.
I don't look at myself as a leader. I do look at myself as part of a community.
The moment I understood this - that my Parkinson's was the one thing I wasn't going to change - I started looking at the things I could change, like the way research is funded.
I find as long as I acknowledge the truth of something, then that's it. I know what it is and then I can operate. But if I overestimate the downside of something or the challenge of something and I get too obsessed about the difficulty of it, then I don't leave enough room to be open to the upside, the possibility.
I have times when I'm off-balance. I have times when I slur my words. I have times when I walk into walls. I have times when I can't remember somebody's name.
My view of life is colored by humor and looking at the best in any situation.
I'm a dad, I'm a husband, I'm an activist, I'm a writer and I'm just a student of the world.
I don't subscribe to any particular doctrine or ideology. I just think that there's kind of a good and bad, the good being life in its purest, happiest form, and the other being the darker side of existence.
I don't have a set of tenets, but I live an ethical life. I practice a humility that presupposes there's a power greater than myself. And I always believe, don't inflict harm where it's not necessary.
Teenagers blithely skip off to uncertain futures, while their parents sit weeping curbside in the Volvo, because the adolescent brain isn't yet formed enough to recognize and evaluate risk.
I always felt that I came up short in the education department, but I've come to the conclusion that we all get an education.
I don't have any affirmations, I don't have any of that stuff. My natural state is to look at things as possibilities and as opportunities.
Pity is a benign form of abuse.
Just as Parkinson's isn't a big topic of conversation in my house, neither is my career.
The 'Rescue Me' gig was a unique opportunity to play a character - a misanthropic, angry guy - who was so contrary to how people think of me.
My whole life, meeting people is like a blind date, because I feel like they've already seen the video on me.
Certainly people have a lot tougher situations than I've had to deal with. But I will say we are all dying from the moment we are born. This is not just rehearsal.
I take the medication for myself so I can transact, not for anyone else. But I am aware that it is empowering for people to see what I do and, for the most part, people in the Parkinson's community are just really happy that Parkinson's is getting mentioned, and not in a pitying way.
Vanity's really overrated. When I was 20, teenage girls had my picture on the wall... I don't need to be pretty anymore. I just am who I am.
I discovered that I was part of a Parkinson's community with similar experiences and similar questions that I'd been dealing with alone.
Humility is always a good thing. It's always a good thing to be humbled by circumstances so you can then come from a sincere place to try to deal with them.
As much as Parkinson's is about movement, the end stage is being frozen. So the more I let that happen, the more I'm gonna be stuck within that and unable to reverse it.
Life delivered me a catastrophe, but I found a richness of soul.
The thing that brings people to wail at a wall, or face Mecca, or to go to church, is a search for that feeling of purity.
I was eccentric, even as a kid. I was an early reader, an early talker. I was very curious in a way that maybe the other kids weren't. I was a little more outgoing.
No, I got a GED in my 30s. My kids know that I never stop learning, and they know I love reading. I have books overflowing everywhere. I am current on today's events and I read the paper every day, and we talk about it, so they see that appetite.
By the time I entered high school, I had forsaken academics altogether in favor of my burgeoning acting career.
I have so many things that I say to my kids, I just drive them crazy.
I'm not a shill for the Democratic Party.
Acceptance doesn't mean resignation; it means understanding that something is what it is and that there's got to be a way through it.
If I don't get food in my mouth, I'm still happy. If my pants are round my ankles, as long as I don't get arrested for indecent exposure, I'm happy. I'm worried about keeping my hair, not how it's combed.
If you have doubts about someone, lay on a couple of jokes. If he doesn't find anything funny, your radar should be screaming. Then I would say be patient with people who are negative, because they're really having a hard time.
I don't set a whole lot of goals. It smacks a little bit of will to me, and I find that will is not the way to go for me.
I didn't just want to be a poster boy and sign on to publicize somebody else's method of operations. If I was going to put myself out there, I wanted to make sure that it was to an end. So I got involved with this congressional hearing about Parkinson's being underfunded.
If you asked my kids to describe me, they'd go through a whole list of words before even thinking about Parkinson's. And honestly, I don't think about it that much either. I talk about it because it's there, but it's not my totality.
I've learned some exciting things - mostly, that people really want to help each other; and that, if you can lay out a vision for them - and that vision is sincere and genuine - they'll get interested.
As a kid, I was into music, played guitar in a band. Then I started acting in plays in junior high school and just got lost in the puzzle of acting, the magic of it. I think it was an escape for me.
I definitely believe in a higher power.
By 21, I was earning six figures a week. By 23, I had a Ferrari. It was nuts.
In fact, Parkinson's has made me a better person. A better husband, father and overall human being.
I believe that the majority of times the scale tilts toward the good. It's this amazing thing that rolls on and if we get in the flow of it, that's God. And if we fight it, if we swim the other way, we're swimming away from the purest expression of this life.
Life is the power that's greater than I can ever comprehend. The way life runs through everything, even the tiniest elements of nature - that makes me humble.
So what I say about Tracy is this: Tracy's big challenge is not having a Parkinson's patient for a husband. It's having me for a husband. I happen to be a Parkinson's patient.
There's always failure. And there's always disappointment. And there's always loss. But the secret is learning from the loss, and realizing that none of those holes are vacuums.
That's the way I look at things - if you focus on the worst case scenario and it happens, you've lived it twice. It sounds like Pollyanna-ish tripe but I'm telling you - it works for me.
I really love being alive. I love my family and my work. I love the opportunity I have to do things. That's what happiness is.
I don't look at life as a battle or as a fight. I don't think I'm scrappy. I'm accepting.
